The solo exhibition Paolo Troilo Actions, curated by Lorenzo Canova, represents the milestone in a larger exhibition project entitled Actions that sees the artist engaged from July to December in three solo shows – San Gimignano, Rome and Milan – through which the artist’s the artist’s artistic journey.
With these words the curator explains the title of the exhibition, “Painting seen as real and metaphorical, self-portraiture as a tool to measure, challenge and overcome one’s physical and mental, the dialectic between one’s body and space as a symbol of the interaction between the self and the world: Paolo Troilo started from these concepts to develop the research that grounds his latest cycle of works entitled eloquently actions” (L. Canova).
Paolo Troilo offers some twenty-five works of large, medium and small dimensions, all works that fully trace the fundamental traits of his poetics made with the highly personal technique of acrylic on canvas spread directly with his fingers, which are the medium with which the artist constructs his figures, stopped in the hic et nunc of black and white: “Black and white emphasize the instant in which all this happens, leaving no chromatic or conceptual escape routes. There is no green of a meadow, the blue of a sky, the red of blood; material and conceptual limits that soften the impact on eyes unprepared for the true origin. Light” (P. Troilo).
Paolo Troilo chooses himself as the subject to represent, a self that is mirrored and reflected and which becomes other than itself – from ego to alter ego – an instrument that induces the viewer to identify with himself, to share the viscerality of emotion by making it his own. His works contain a reflection on life – the ancient struggle between good and evil – on man, his his cages and his need for escape. His works give voice and form to a cry universal that is intimate and natural, personal and collective need and that becomes cathartic if it is accompanies conditioning.
